From Mainframe to FreeBSD

Author:

Hans-Martin Rasch

Author Description:

Born 1954 in northern Germany,
studied mathematics in Kiel,
worked at the "Institut für Dynamische Systeme" at the university of Bremen,
since 1990 working at the commercial computer center DSS (Data Service Stockelsdorf)

Abstract:

When migrating from a mainframe to a UNIX-like system,
in addition to the operating system itself you have to replace several
components which are closely connected to the mainframe system:
ISAM (i.e. B-tree based storage), shared updates,
job classes, SORT, SPOOL, ARCHIVE, ...
This talk is about the successful migration of our BS2000 mainframe applications,
consisting of online transaction processing and batch jobs,
to FreeBSD and Open Source. It was a main request to keep the core
of the application unchanged: data storage in B-trees and a plethora
of COBOL sources.